My current job doesn’t offer me at the moment the opportunity to play with RAC or other stuff, so I decided to build my own RAC on my Windows7-desktop (64-bits, 8GB RAM), using 3 VM’s (VM-workstation , 7.1.3 build-324285) :

2 VM’s (VMware, not OracleVM!) for two RAC-nodes, based on OEL 5.5, 11.2.0.2 for infra and database.

1 VM as my own storage, based on Openfiler 2.3 (free) and ASM as storage manager.

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Powered by rPath Linux, Openfiler is a free browser-based network storage management utility that delivers file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and block-based Storage Area Networking (SAN) in a single framework. Openfiler supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, however, we will only be making use of its iSCSI capabilities to implement an inexpensive SAN for the shared storage components required by Oracle RAC 11g. A 500GB internal hard drive will be connected to the network storage server (sometimes referred to in this article as the Openfiler server) through an internal embedded SATA II controller. The Openfiler server will be configured to use this disk for iSCSI based storage and will be used in our Oracle RAC 11g configuration to store the shared files required by Oracle Clusterware as well as all Oracle ASM volumes.

While installing a grid – infrastructure on my own RAC-cluster (11.2.0.2 on VMware), using ASM with Openfiler as my own SAN, the prerequisite-check fails at step 15 (in the oraInstaller-gui) with :

PRVF-5150 : Path ORCL:VOL1 is not a valid path on all nodes

This is also the case for all the other volumes I created. But… where does this come from? Hmmm.. this turned out to be a unpublished bug, and it can be safely ignored when you are convinced you did it right, and performed some checks:

While building my own RAC (11.2.0.2) on two VM’s, using a third VM with Openfiler on it as my SAN, I had to dowload, install, configure and load oracleasm / ASMLIB. Loading didn’t go smoothly at my own project. First I analyzed what I did, steps I took:

Step 1 : Downloading the right packages from the otn-page. It’s crucial at this point to know exactly which packages you need, otherwise you may get some vague errors.